Surrey-based Updata specialises in networking and connectivity services in the public sector,
and claims a vendor- and supplier-agnostic approach enables it to offer higher value, best-of-breed
services to its customers.

MD Richard Bennett explained that having earned the trust of some of the UK’s “most progressive”
councils, he felt that “as an SME we realised that we would struggle to continue our growth in
terms of capabilities and market opportunities”.

“We believe that being part of the Capita family provides both of us with the opportunity to
leverage our respective domain expertise and market relationships to provide even more compelling
managed network solutions to the Public Sector.”

Gartner has warned the significant number of users that are still using Windows XP to move away
from the operating system as soon as possible to avoid security risks once support ends on 8
April.

A third of businesses still have over 10% of their systems
running XP

The analyst house is not alone in sounding warnings and has joined the growing chorus of voices
that are reaching fever pitch with the support from Microsoft being switched of.

Although the government
has negotiated extra time to sort itself out the vast majority of XP users, which Gartner estimates is around still 25% of enterprise systems, will
be left with little option but to go it alone from next week.

"Almost every organisation will have some XP left – there’s lots of Windows 95 running in
hospitals, for example. But overall, when support ends, we estimate that 20-25% of enterprise
systems will still run XP and that one third of enterprises will have more than 10% of their
systems remaining on XP," said Michael Silver, vice president and distinguished analyst at
Gartner.

In a brief statement released to the market on the morning of 31 March, Redcentric claimed it
was trading comfortably in line with market expectations, and expected its sales for the year
ending 31 March to be strong.

It spoke of a strong business pipeline and a number of recent contract wins that will hopefully
put it in good stead for a fruitful fiscal 2015 as well.

Protection of intellectual property has taken great strides in the last couple of years but the
politicians leading the fight against piracy admit that there is still more to be done.

Speaking at an event at Parliament organised by the Federation Against Software (FAST) and Microsoft the
intellectual property adviser to the Prime Minister Mike Weatherley MP said that there had been "a
good couple of years on IP" and the issue was being taken much more seriously by the
government.

The demise of support for Windows XP might be attracting current interest but many SMEs are
regularly using software that has gone well past its sell by date leaving themselves exposed to all
sorts of problems.

With just six days until support for XP gets turned off the security
world is warning that customers will be at risk of being targeted by cyber criminals but F-Secure has highlighted a
wider problem with software in general.

With the first quarter of 2014 wrapped up the prospects of the year delivering growth in IT
spending are still on track with the recovery in the global economy still on pace to support
forecasts made at the start of the year.

Analysts at Gartner have revealed their latest stats on the worldwide software market,
revealing the growing profile and importance of software-as-a-service (SaaS) to the channel, as
Salesforce.com moved onto the top 10 chart for the first time.

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